1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a recording method for recording information files on a recording medium, and an apparatus therefor.
2. Description of Related Art
An incremental write system is known as a recording method for write-once type recording media, represented by CD-R.
FIG. 1 shows a recording format on a recording disc produced by the incremental write system.
In the incremental write system, a lead-in area LI, a lead-out area LO, and an area for recording file management data PVD (Primary Volume Descripter) shown in FIG. 1 are previously secured on the recording disc. If an information file F.sub.1 having a size of at least one file is to be recorded on the recording disc, the information file F.sub.1 is recorded on the recording medium after the area of the file management data PVD. However, at the head position of the information file F.sub.1, a file management data piece V-PVD.sub.1 relating to the information file F.sub.1 itself is recorded. The file management data V-PVD indicates the attribute, directory, and so on, of the information file to be recorded from the immediately following position.
When writing a new information file F.sub.2 additionally on the recording disc described above, the new information file F.sub.2 is written after the information file F.sub.1. In this process, a new file management data piece V-PVD.sub.2 is recorded at the head position of the information file F.sub.2 as in the process described above. However, the file management data piece V-PVD.sub.2 also includes the contents of the file management data piece V-PVD.sub.1 described above.
Subsequently, the additional writing of data is performed in the similar manner as described above, and a file management data V-PVDn obtained finally is recorded in the area of the file management data PVD. By this procedure, the recording operation on a recording disc is completed.
The recording method described above, however, has a drawback that the data amount of the file management data V-PVD (file management data V-PVDn is the maximum) increases each time an information file is recorded additionally. This has been causing to limit the recording size of the information files themselves recordable on a single disc.